letting go

By: Cedric Bertelli

reliving the origin of our emotional difficulties to let them go

For as long as I can remember – back to my kindergarten years in France, where I was born – I always have been an anxious person. I held within me a lot of fears, anxieties, and anger. A whole spectrum of negative emotions.

As a young child, I became skilled in hiding my anxiety behind work, good grades in school, and humor. But it expressed itself negatively through my body. I was dealing with eczema, asthma, anxiety attacks and angry outbursts at home.

I pursued a career in the restaurant business because I wanted to bring joy to people. I enjoyed a great deal of professional success. I spent most of my career in the USA, working for a major corporation. While everything seemed easy and smooth for me from the outside, inside I was still dealing with a great deal of anxiety and fears. Restaurants and hotels are like small worlds, or even small laboratories. For years, I was able to observe just how much emotional triggers rule our lives, whether at the tables with restaurant patrons or in the kitchen with my employees.

In my mid twenties, I decided to go on a personal quest to experience several kinds of body and mind techniques to get rid of my own anxieties, so I could better help my staff and the people around me. Although many of the modalities I experienced were powerful, most of them required a lot of effort, time and money, and the effects were temporary. It was a lifelong, ongoing process. That was not what I was looking for. I believe in work, but I also believe in definite, measurable results.

Most of our fears or emotional struggles are irrational. Sure, we can intellectually find a reason why we are the way we are, why we are reacting a certain way, such as: “I get angry in traffic, because people are driving like idiots!”, “I am lacking self-confidence because when I was a kid my parents did this or that…”, “I cannot have a normal relationship because my ex broke my heart 2 years ago”. We can find reasons why,  but this understanding does not bring healing. We still suffer.

After many years in the corporate world, I was feeling useless in the world. I was not really helping anyone. I was not feeling fulfilled. In 2009, I was ready to quit my job. Ok, but for what? That was when I found the work of a fellow French man, Luc Nicon.

This man claimed that once a person was able to identify an emotional difficulty (such as phobias, anxieties, stress, anger etc.), they could regulate it within 30 minutes when working with the approach he designed, called T.I.P.I. Of course, I was skeptical.

What really triggered my interest is that Luc Nicon was not a spiritual teacher, or even a therapist. He was a researcher and teacher with a solid reputation who was working with athletes and major companies. What was also very appealing about this work was the fact that anyone could learn this technique for themselves and be completely autonomous with it very quickly (in 3 hours.)

I read his book (TIPI, technique for the sensory identification of unconscious fears – “T.i.p.i, being a French acronym for “Technique d’Identification Sensorielle des Peurs Inconscientes”) that explained his research, and my interest in the process grew.

I contacted Luc to ask more information about it, and his answer was quite simple:

“I am not going to try to convince you, try the process on yourself. You can do so when you are triggered, when you are in an emotional difficulty.

When you feel an unpleasant emotion (stress for example)
Make sure you are in a “safe” place and that you won’t have to deal with anything or anyone.Pay attention to the physical sensations present in your body, let them evolve, without doing anything, without taking control, just stay a conscious observer of your physical sensations until you feel calm.

This process will last 2 or 3 minutes at most, but usually it will last 30 seconds. After that, the emotion you started your session with will be resolved, permanently. It will just not be a part of your life anymore”.

Hmmm, ok, it was a bit too simple, a bit disappointing actually. I did not think it would do anything thrilling, but I have tried things a lot crazier than this stuff before, so what the hell, I gave it a shot.

The next opportunity came quite fast: every week, I was extremely triggered when one specific coworker gave his comments during a weekly meeting. This Friday afternoon, as usual, when he started speaking, I felt a lot of anger coming up. Perfect! I excused myself, went to the bathroom, locked the door and tried Tipi:

  • I closed my eyes
  • I Paid attention to my physical sensations (my throat was tight and dry, my stomach twisted, and I was feeling abnormally hot)
  • I stayed with these sensations, without trying to change them, just staying present with them.
  • And they indeed evolved: what was tight became loose, my temperature rose even more, then went down, my stomach untwisted, and I felt that all my blood left me from my belly button and came flowing back with a pleasant warm feeling.
  • I just let all that happen without doing anything
  • Until I felt calm… I then opened my eyes.

I came back to the meeting, feeling a little tired but calm.

The interesting part is that the following week, at the same meeting, I was not triggered at all by this colleague. Intrigued, I repeated the process a few more times on different issues (road rage), and every time the emotional difficulty I worked on would not come back.

Something potent was happening, something that I did not understand but which was clearly working.  I decided to quit my 6 figure salary job and go back to France to study with Luc Nicon himself, with the idea to bring this work back to the US.

Back in my home country, I became a Tipi specialist, meaning that once someone identifies an emotional difficulty, I am able to help this person resolve it (even if they are not feeling triggered right then). I became really good at it very quickly: a session with a client was taking less than 30 minutes.

Interestingly, for me personally, as I cleared some of my emotional difficulties, such as my fears, all my physical symptoms such as eczema disappeared.

I asked Mr. Nicon to teach me to become a trainer, in order to bring Tipi to the US. He did, and it is now my pleasure to help people regulating their emotional difficulties.

So what happens during a Tipi session?

During a Tipi session with a specialist, the person works on one specific recurrent emotional difficulty.

The goal of a One-on-One Session is for people to experience a total and permanent resolution of the difficulty they selected to work on.

There is one requirement to every session: ӬYou must be able to clearly remember a real life moment that represents the emotional difficulty you want to resolve.

During a session, we are simply seated facing each other, and the person seeking help is guided through the steps for her/him to consciously connect to her/his sensory memory through the sensations present in the body after reliving a specific situation (“reliving” being a precise process).

Clients are 100% conscious during the whole session. They do not feel any emotional pain during the session, however they might experience uncomfortable physical sensations for few seconds.

When someone decides to work with a specialist on a recurrent emotional difficulty, no story is shared, the specialist is taking the person the way he/she is right now, with the actual current difficulty experienced today.

A session generally takes less than 30 minutes, and the effect of Tipi is immediate. In certain cases one more session may be necessary. A trained Tipi specialist can teach you how to be autonomous with the approach in 3 hours.

It is a fact that we all possess a natural ability to self-regulate our emotions. For example: after a car accident, or a relationship break up there may be a period of heightened emotions. It may seem like the experience will never end. Yet, eventually the emotional experience of the trauma naturally resolves itself. One day we find ourselves driving without a second thought, or deeply in love with another person.

However, for some of us, this natural ability may become blocked. For many individuals, this only becomes more difficult over time.

According to key neuroscience research studies, these blocks develop in response to particularly intense events or fears.

Tipi is a process in which one ‘reconnects’, physically (through physical sensations) to the original event that created such blocks.

This process re-establishes the natural self-regulation of these blocked emotions.

When we are “in” the emotion, the door to self emotional regulation is wide open.

One year ago, someone very close to me committed suicide. No one around her, including myself had any idea of her distress. Some of us are experts at hiding our pain. Most of the time these people just cannot ask for help, they do not want to talk about their stories.

But I know for a fact that most of them are trying to find ways to get better. Putting the information about Tipi out there is so important for me. People who can’t ask for help can learn to do this work on themselves, by themselves. This organic tool is here for us to use.

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